Paradox Interactive, the Swedish developers behind strategy games like Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis will acquire Harebrained Schemes. Harebrained Schemes is the studio that is well-known for their Shadowrun series and the just released and critically acclaimed Battletech.
Here’s what the CEO of Paradox had to say on the acquisition, “Harebrained Schemes have proven themselves as a world-class studio with a very talented team within a genre where Paradox wants to be present. In addition, we really like the studio, the people who run it, and their games; these are all absolute hard criteria for us in any acquisition. Our recent successful launch of Battletech, our first project together, has been a fantastic collaboration, but the possibilities of what we can do together in the long term now that we’ve joined forces — that’s what has us truly excited.”
Harebrained is a studio that has always received a lot of praise from their fans despite being a small studio. According to the CEO of Harebrained, Jordan Weisman, the acquisition allows his studio to completely focus on the games that they love making, without worrying about finances and marketing. Harebrained is one of the first studios that adopted crowdfunding in order to fund their 2012 game Shadowrun Returns, and crowdfunding has since been the most important way for them to fund games. The acquisition will allow the studio to work with bigger and more secure budgets, which will drastically improve the quality of the games and give the studio a lot more leeway.
The studios have stated that working together on Battletech is what ultimately lead to the acquisition. Mitch Gitelman, co-founder of Harebrained said, “Our experience working with Paradox on BattleTech was the best of our careers and proved to us that this was a company we would be proud to be a part of.” He added, “We share a deep respect for our audiences, for healthy and collaborative teams, and for the creative process itself — the fit just works.”
Paradox has said that Harebrained will continue to develop video games with its own internal teams and that Paradox will purely assist with financing, distribution and design expertise.
